While still in its infancy, there’s one feature I really, really wish Mastodon had. I think it’s one that would really set it apart from the other social media networks, and lean more heavily into its federated approach.
And that feature is the ability to post solely to your own instance. Meaning, the message stays on the instance server and isn’t federated anywhere else, but is viewable on the local feed^1.
This would really help make those instances feel more like actual communities. Instances would really matter; or, rather, they really could matter. Not just in terms of moderation, which is essentially the primary way they do right now, but in a far more important way.
They could foster real communities—ones with their own posting rules, conversational norms, traditions, inside jokes, and, importantly, their own trust/safety and vetting measures—that just don’t seem to exist en mass on Mastodon instances today. After all, small, topic-focused communities make the very best online communities. Mastodon could power soooo many of these!!
I don’t want one single huge social network, nor one big firehose feed from which to consume everything—from updates about our friends’ latest trip to viral cat videos to local severe weather alerts to national election news. We’ve tried that, first with Facebook, and then with Twitter, and it all ended up being a total fucking disaster, as far as I’m concerned.
Small communities are where it’s at. Even on the big corporate platforms, you naturally seek out those smaller communities: perhaps around one’s geography, or hobby, or fandom, or identity.
We don’t all need to be shoved into one behemoth for-profit-at-all-costs platform to participate in those smaller communities. I personally want the separation between various parts of my life. I don’t want it all mixed together, all the time. And it’s incredibly easy to swap between instance accounts on most modern apps.
And, importantly, followers don’t need to be bombarded with frequent posts about a single topic, either.
But I also think that interoperability is a useful feature. Interoperability allows us to all seek out the experience we want to have, while maintaining a broader collection of friends and followers. Adjacent communities can still easily connect with each other, even when some of the messages remain private within one community or another. Each participant can choose whether to broadcast their post to just members of their primary community, or to just their own followers, or to the broader public at large.
A few examples:
- An LGBTQ-only instance that provides a safe place for conversations you might not want to have in more public settings.
- A football fan club, where supporters can have intense, in-game conversations without spamming their other followers with a bevy of posts.
- An instance for Mastodon admins, where they can have technical and moderation discussions that might not be appropriate for public posting.
I know a few forks have something similar to this, but I’d love for it to be included in the main Mastodon code. The key here is for lots of new, topically-focused instances to emerge. And for that to happen, they’ll likely need other make use of turn-key Mastodon hosting companies, like masto.host, which stick to just the official Mastodon releases to keep things easy.
Anyway, that’s the vision I’d like to see come true—small, niche-focused Mastodon communities that can share “privately” amongst themselves, but still effortlessly connect to the broader Activity Pub fediverse.